![]() ![]() ![]() At one point, the young David plays his harp for Shaul and helps to ease the fading king’s madness. From the texture of wool tunics, the fragility of clay tablets, and the easy grazing of goats to the outsized pride of the men, the unquestioned subjugation of women, and the hot brutality of the nonstop battles, Brooks’s vision of the biblical world is enrapturing.ĭavid is also an extraordinary musician, as Natan points out repeatedly and somewhat breathlessly. ![]() The book gets its title from a contemporary song, Leonard Cohen’s majestic “Hallelujah,” but it takes place in King David’s Second Iron Age, all of which Brooks brings to life with her customary mix of telling detail and broad landscape. Her new novel, “The Secret Chord,” further arouses suspicion of such magical powers. With sensory acuity and a deep and complex understanding of emotional states, she conjures up the way we lived then. Sometimes, reading her work, she draws you so thoroughly into another era that you swear she’s actually lived in it. The author of historical novels including “Caleb’s Crossing” and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “March,” she seems able to transport herself back to earlier periods, to time travel. There’s something bordering on the supernatural about Geraldine Brooks. ![]()
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